Let me tell you about my campaign

Yes, I know.  Deal with it, you’re going to have to hear a little about my campaign to understand the point of this exercise.  The quest began with Keep on the Shadowfell and then evolved into one of my favorite homebrew settings.  I had a grand plan, which involved leveraging the time travel hooks of the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 to go back and rewrite the timeline of a previous campaign.  I figured this served me in a few ways, and them in a a few ways: the history of this setting is well developed, the characters were fun, and their enemy is known to them.  Add into the mix that at least one of the players had participated in the past campaign and I figured that I would be scott-free on keeping their attention and keeping them engaged.

Cue Summer of last year.  One of our group couldn’t make regular games and I had just gotten the Tomb of Horrors, so we agreed outside-of-game that we’d like to suspend any serious activity on the main plot and play some sessions of the module.  I even devised a way that it could be organic to the plot, so we did this.  This went swimmingly, and we had a few months at the end of last year to further dive into the original plotline.  All was well.

The Return to the Past

So the group tracks a cult along their plot to return back in time to prevent the destruction of the Big Bad Guy so they can bring him back to take over the world.  This goes great, and back to the past they go.  After interacting with the previous incarnation of their hometown for a bit, they follow the original threads of the plot to a few key points.  They had puzzled out the plot lines to follow, but didn’t really commit fully to one line…. instead they flipped back and forth between the plotlines and didn’t really accomplish much.

A few sessions of this go by, and before long my inability to plan a coherent way to get them back on course manifests itself… I had determined that enough time had passed that surely something must have happened.  The plotlines remaining would have stretched out for another year or so at the rate we play and the lack of general focus was annoying (at the worst) and obvious (at the best).  I decided there was no choice but to reboot the situation.

I chose a Hiro Nakamura style event to reboot.  I did a few very obvious SOMETHING HAS CHANGED time skips in the course of a single session, culminating in the group’s return to their now abandoned hometown (previously a bustling city).  The ranger and avenger opted to check out the temple, and found a man with a giant broadsword strapped to his back in strange clothes.  He was there to warn them that this timeline was doomed and they must leave it as soon as possible (they have a means to do this).  I also opted to use this opportunity to illustrate to them that excessive time travelling was detrimental, this gentleman was pretty messed up from the process.

Finally, they took the bait and we ended the session at the crossroads where they can choose where in time they want to go.

The Retrospecticus

So what could I have done differently?  Many things.  A word to the wise: when introducing time travel, have both an entry and an exit plan and give the players some real motivation to follow a plotline.  This could have easily been solved by a little more detailed planning on my part.  Also, there were many opportunities for me to nudge the group along (possibly even in narrative style) to get them down the line enough to pick up the proper path.

The other big thing that I could have done is used other means to keep the plotlines alive between sessions.  DNAPhil recently authored an excellent article at Gnome Stew entitled “Keeping The Home Fires Burning” covering this very topic.  There’s some great advice there, some I have even heeded in the past.  For the original campaign (the one that established the plot, characters, and setting that my current group returned to) we employed a group blog where the players could write articles in the form of diary entries or letters to their family.  It succeeded in giving the players another outlet to develop their characters and gave me an easy medium to collect additional side-plot ideas.

Suffice it to say I’m a little dismayed that I had to go so far as to reboot this portion of the campaign.  I can only look forward, because unlike my campaign there’s no way to go back and fix it.  More soon!

Sadly, I didn’t read the fine print and just assumed that the terrifying dracolich of yore would provide an adequate solo creature to both frighten and challenge my players.  Frighten, yes.  Challenge, not so much.  You see, in 4e the dracolich is a controller.  This job it does admirably, having stunned most of the party for several consecutive rounds.  The trouble came in dealing the damage.  Unintelligently, I split up the yuan-ti’s that they recommend as being a Level 20 encounter into a second room and they were dispatched the previous session… so there was nothing in the way of big damage dealing to really threaten the party… what a shame.

So the moral of the story is this: when designing an encounter, be very sure to read what creature type you’re setting up to be your solo baddie… controllers don’t fit the bill very well, aside for dragging out combat extensively due to most of the party being stunned.

The upside: one of my players took the dracolich skull to ornament his bachelor pad with.  I really love my current group of players.

Do you cheat?  The answer: The DM really can’t cheat.  You’re the umpire, and what you say goes.  As such, it’s certainly within your rights to sway things one way or another to keep people happy or keep things running smoothly.

Other editions of the D&D rules have stated the case in similar but slightly different ways, and ultimately the responsibility comes down to you and the DM to take the appropriate action to keep the game fun or running smoothly.  Please note: this does not define what “keep people happy” or “running smoothly” means.  In my games, I considered my plot an outline… a mere suggestion… so that the players can choose to stay in the lines or to color way outside them.  Vanir often chose to color way outside the lines, onto the table, all over the walls, and perhaps two or three houses down the block.  I have always enjoyed letting my players define the world that they act in to a certain extent, allowing them to define where the railroad tracks get laid down to get the story from point A to point B.

So what’s a man to do?

To address Vanir’s problem specifically: every good DM cheats.  The trick is to provide the players with enough breadth so they don’t necessarily see you cheating.  For example: we’re fighting a long battle.  The players are expending their abilities and skills and it is depleting them, but not far enough that they are in any real danger of dying.  Could I run this encounter out to the very last hit point that the bad guy contains?  Sure I could.  Would it be boring, providing that the bad guy can’t really do enough damage to exhaust the group?  Absolutely.  So you fudge the bad guy’s hit points a bit to make the encounter end.

What I don’t like doing is (unfortunately) what Vanir did in his campaign: not being used to his players acting off-script, he magically teleported them to the next plot point.  There’s nothing really WRONG with doing this, but I do like some cause and effect to occur if the players act differently than they should have.  Just leading them to the next battle or skill challenge can feel pretty obvious to the players and take them out of the story.  I’m not beating up on Vanir any more than he already has himself, but better ways to deal with this type of situation mostly come with experience.  Figuring out a few contingency plans for what will happen if the players don’t take the plot hook or interact with NPCs in a non-ideal way will help to smooth these bumps.

The other main thing that Vanir mentions in his article is the loss of innocence from being a player.  Now you KNOW the fudging that can occur, and you start to ask yourself if every fun or exciting moment in a campaign was because of the DM acting to favor the players in some way.  The only advice I can give is this: sit back and enjoy the ride.  Have some caffeine and sugar, and let the game unfold.

It’s actually pretty fun sitting in the player’s chair again to see if you can detect when the DM is making stuff up.  I’ve found a few of them have a “tell”… they shuffle some papers, roll some dice that have no outcome on the encounter at all, or stare at the players with a blank or angry expression when things aren’t going as they anticipate.  It’s also fun to see how they resolve the situations as well, you can learn something from their responses too.  If I possessed the insane ability to play off-script player characters like Vanir does, I would be doing that all the time and see how the DM reacts.

But back to the main point: you never really can “un-know” the fact that the DM does some trickery to make the game move forward.  Just know it’s part of his job, and it’s part of your job to enjoy the story and be invested in your player character.  That’s the real fun anyway… building up a hero based on your own imagination.  There’s no rule set or die roll that should affect that aspect of roleplaying games one bit.

I am also interested in what this means for future miniature offerings.  If Wizards is focusing their efforts more on the collector’s sets and player miniatures, that could mean some iconic and very cool special edition miniatures are coming down the pipeline.  Personally, I think they should continue down the line of gods and produce more large scale figures, like say Bahamut or Llolth.  Pretty much any god or goddess that could provoke a pants-crapping response like the Orcus figure.  More of that would be excellent.

Rest in peace, random miniature booster packs.  Long live the tokens!

So what do you get for your $35?  Honestly, not much.  There’s a nice collector’s box, the four beholders (painted quite well and rendered in varying styles of transparent plastic for ultimate coolness), and stat cards for use in the miniatures game.

Is it worth it?  I don’t know.  As we have covered here, I have had a lukewarm relationship with miniatures in my D&D games.  I don’t collect them, but I do enjoy using them in my games.  In the past, I have struggled with the random nature of the miniature booster packs and balked at paying the going rate on Ebay for the desirable few.  In fact, at GenCon I was fully prepared to purchase a Beholder at the miniature booth and was stopped short by a $20 price tag.

I will fully accept the criticism that I am being too cheap.  I judge most of my gaming materials in the form of how much utility I am going to get out of them, and unless they have some serious bad luck or are set in a specific storyline your standard adventuring party doesn’t happen across a Beholder every day.  (Unless you make that happen, which… well… best not to get into that.  My players are reading.)

I suppose part of it is the Beholder Set being advertised as a “limited edition” although try as I might I found no edition number on the box or any of the figures.  Which likely means “limited insofar that it is limited by how many we can sell to people.”  I’ll happily retract that statement if someone can point me toward some way to determine how limited this run will be, but I view this approach as a convenient way to get people to ignore they’re paying extra for a fancy box and far less miniatures than you would get buying $35 worth of booster packs.

Don’t misconstrue this as regret for my purchase.  The set is very cool and I am happy to have them, I just would’ve been much happier with a cheaper price tag.  No doubt my opinion will change dramatically when I get to roast my adventuring party with those lovely little eye-stalks, but that is a matter for another day.  If you really like Beholders, you will not be disappointed by this set.  If you really like to get a lot for your dollar, you might be disappointed.

The Good

Most of the group was very excited for Gamma World, specifically the guys who were familiar with previous editions.  Everyone came with their creative hats on, and character creation was a blast (just as it was with our last excursion into Gamma Terra).  We had several memorable characters in the group last night, my favorites being a Seismic/Empath named Briq, who was a mutant comprised of trapped souls inside of a brick wall from a foundry, and a redneck Plant/Cockroach named Six who drives a rusty pickup truck and opts to chew anything he finds on the ground like chewing tobacco.  Six happens to have several other charming characteristics, none of which I feel like detailing in the polite company of my readers at this time.

The other players in our group presented some strong character concepts, but I will defer speaking about their qualities until another time.

The Bad / The Ugly

Once again, character creation took far too long due to the lack of multiple copies of the rulebook.  Pro Tip: think ahead and make copies of the mutant traits and powers (I wish I had!)  Our game got off to a slow start as a result, and thanks to cramped space on the Gamma World Character Sheet a few of our unfamiliar players were waning in enthusiasm by the beginning of the actual game play.  Thankfully, we were saved by the colorful characters that had been created and started things off with a “getting to know you” roundtable that got everyone re-energized.

Here’s another tip from the trenches: spend a little time with box set prior to playing with a group.  The backstory for the provided adventure is a little sparse and there’s not a great deal of motivation for the players to actually follow the plot hooks provided in the campaign preamble.  Both times I have attempted to run this story, the group had retreated into the village for information and I was left somewhat flat-footed.  Ultimately, everyone ended up in the right place and the fun could begin.  I found a few additional clunky spots in the first two encounters, but nothing a little deft DM magic couldn’t spackle over.

Conclusions

Gamma World is fun, however it didn’t seem to be everyone’s cup of tea at our gaming table tonight.  A few members of our party are definitely excited to play more, but there were an indifferent few that will be unlikely to grace Gamma Terra again for awhile.  There were a few additional moving parts in the Alpha Mutations and Omega Tech that confused or perturbed some and excited others, it was pretty interesting to see these two factions plead their case.

As with any other roleplaying game, it seems that predispositions played a big role.  Those that were excited about the game at the beginning enjoyed it, those that were lukewarm or newcomers enjoyed it markedly less.  Personally, I love the randomness of the setting and the propensity toward creative characters that can be strongly roleplayed.  That keeps me coming back. If you want to see more Gamma World coverage, check out this great review over at Geeks Dream Girl or the positively astounding amount of material at Critical-Hits (including the mysterious and powerful Junkulator!)

More soon!

Character Generation

As I postulated yesterday, character creation was a really fun aspect of the game.  We opted for the traditional no-holds-barred random character generation to excellent results.  Our party consisted of:

• A mind breaker / plant hybrid
• A highly intelligent yeti android with only three Charisma
• A human-sized felinoid / cockroach named Mittens St. Cloud
• A plant / gravity controller clad in cast-off street signs
• A rat swarm / empath named Thwack

Before character creation was even complete, the group was brainstorming ideas about how their characters would act.  “Can a length of highway guardrail be a heavy melee weapon?”  Absolutely.  Can my yeti android communicate by angry yelling even though he is Intelligent?” Sure he can!  “Can Mittens St. Cloud have a monocle?  Of course he can!  And so forth.  I didn’t even have a character to roll and I was already enjoying the carnage.

There were some confusing aspects, which were compounded by only two of us having the rulebooks from our box sets to go around.  There were some questions about whether we had healing surges or how that worked, and some digging around in the rules indicated that healing was stripped down even compared to 4e D&D (which was fine).  The skill bonuses were slightly confusing, with many wondering if they got BOTH skill bonuses from your origins or just one.  We worked that out fairly quickly, but the character sheet wasn’t extremely clear on some of those details.

Gameplay

Gameplay was very reminiscent of 4e D&D.  The provided adventure is a series of combat encounters (so far, we only made it through three combats) but the players made up several creative solutions.  No, they didn’t want to just open the locked tower doors… let’s have the android yeti ram their pickup truck into it while yelling furiously!  Naturally, that approach worked and they made quite an entrance into encounter number two.  The presence of largely improvised weaponry (outside of the Omega Tech) and random junk to use in their adventure lends a MacGuyver-esque quality to the game.  The players enjoyed finding random junk alongside their Omega Tech treasure, and made heavy use of their Alpha mutations to help them dispatch the angry band of mutant badger guards.

There has been some controversy around the trading card aspect of Gamma World.  I think they enhance the game, but are unnecessary to enjoy the game itself.  Matt, one of our players, generously donated each player (and myself) a Gamma World booster pack.  I matched this donation so each player could pull from their own Alpha mutation and Omega Tech deck, and I think they enjoyed having their own cards to use.  One player said “I’m attached to these mutations, so I sure hope you don’t want these cards back at the end!” so clearly there is some enjoyment to be had there.

First Impressions

In short, I am a Gamma World fan.  It breeds irreverent, fun, laugh-ridden game sessions with unique characters that change as much as the whims of our players.  It is fun to run, because of the creativity caused by random junk and the use of alpha mutations.  The rule system is lightweight and open to some interpretation which keeps the game light and enjoyable to everyone, there wasn’t a lot of digging around in the rulebook to figure out how things should behave (this was helped by the fact that most of our players were experienced in 4e).

I’ll be playing a LOT more Gamma World as the months tick by.  I hope that expansions for the game are plentiful, and it would be GREAT if we could buy the rulebook on its own for casual player characters to use during character creation.  I really want to play this game with Vanir, I can imagine that the fruits of his brain would lend themselves well to Gamma Terra.  In the meantime, you can check out the great Gamma World coverage over at Critical-Hits if you need more of a fix.

More soon!

What I Planned

The progenitor of DM Revolution, Justin (of Wombat Cast) encouraged us to be creative and go outside the box to try new concepts.  I decided that I wanted to try to run a roleplaying heavy set of sessions that included primarily Skill Challenges in lieu of combat.  I primarily used the notion of branching skill challenges to set up my plotline for these short sessions.  For tonight’s game, I had a three sets of branching skill challenges that would allow the players to pursue different avenues and two nested skill challenges.  (You can find excellent examples of how to structure branching skill challenges and nested skill challenges can be found at At-Will.)

I have never run a session with a goal of using all Skill Challenges, nor did I know if the group would be receptive to this type of game.

The Way It Went Down

The group followed only two of the “hooks” to these skill challenges directly, however they ended up at two others in a roundabout fashion.  Most of these Skill Challenges were designed to disseminate information, and one of our characters even came up with a creative “off-script” skill to use that resulted in success.  The group readily dove into roleplay, and much of the session was them interacting with both my planned NPC characters and some impromptu NPCs that they chose to interact with.

That was the best part of this experience… the players helped to write the story.  It happened that I used the revised Skill Challenge chart to allow the group to make their own encounters as they interacted with people of their choosing.  In fact, they even went into a few encounters expecting to have to fight based on the information they received during partial successes.  Thanks to not going in guns-blazing, they were able to roleplay their way to most of the rest of the available information.

The session ended up with an opportunity for a Skill Challenge that I suspected would turn to combat and it did (bandits running away from a smash/grab job are too tempting to chase).  Just as the game shop was closing, the group defeated most of the bandits (leaving one alive for questioning).  This led them to an unexpected ending for this session, but it sets up nicely for what I have planned next week.

In Conclusion

Skill Challenges are great for encouraging roleplay.  Using branching and nested skill challenges helps to outline a plot nicely, but still allows the players for enough deviation as not to feel extremely “on rails.”  I suspect some of the players tired a little of all the roleplaying, which is why I strongly recommend having some Skill Challenges that can devolve into combat if the group wants that.

I feel like we had a session that was wildly successful with mostly Skill Challenges.  The roleplaying was fun, people were laughing and creatively using their abilities and the players helped me to write the story.  A man can’t ask for much more than that!  I will be continuing down this avenue for next week’s session, but I plan to up the ante.

• Our characters began at level 11 with a small treasure parcel of gear.
• Each DM gets to run two weeks of encounters, each 1.5 hours in length.
• Creativity is encouraged in encounter design.
• It’s open to everyone, players can circulate in and out as their schedules permit.

The Campaign So Far

The campaign started out with an escape from a prison, which was later revealed to be a floating fortress guarded by a young dragon.  After exiting the compound, we traded with some roving merchants that had docked a floating boat near the edge of the cloud fortress but before we could negotiate safe passage we were attacked by young giantlike creatures.

The merchants escaped largely unscathed, but didn’t stop to take our group with them.  After wandering around the desolate floating fortresses region and nearly starving, we came across another docked floating airship inhabited by savage traders that attempted to poison and then kill us.

We got the upper hand, and succeeded in boarding and then crashing the airship into a barn outside of Waterdeep.  Last week’s encounter thwarted the owner of the barn, which was breeding demon horses for a reason not fully known. (I missed this session, so the details are unclear).

Now it’s my turn…

Starting next Wednesday, it’s my turn to pick up this strange storyline and put my own twist on it.  Our group tends to be fairly combat heavy and I have heard some complaints that there is not enough roleplaying, so I think that I want to do something more roleplay centered and skill challenge based.  The group is a very funny, raucous group of people and I feel like they’d react well to a chance to really be in character and not have to just kill things to pass the sessions.

So let’s collaborate together!  If you’ve got an interesting plot idea based on the synopsis above or some recommendations for creating short and satisfying roleplaying encounters for a group of around 6 players chime in!  I’d love to get some creative input or some advice.

Luckily, there were a few great ones available in the first section of the Tomb of Horrors to try.  Despite my group’s penchant toward not getting started early, I found that the addition of the skill challenges really helped to make them feel accomplished.

My only complaint is one of my own creation… if I would have read up on the challenges ahead of time I would have been able to come up with some additional flavor text so it wasn’t so repetitious and didn’t devolve into blatent statements of success or failure.  Despite the repetition, I found them fun to run and the players found the challenges at the very least interesting.

Maybe a bit of additional preparation next time will make them even better!